The story of how Fatma Charfi’s Aberics came into being exudes a mythological aura. Referred to collectively by the artist as Aberics and individually as Abrouc (fig. 1), the twisted-paper figurines are signature elements that became central components in her work through grief: Watching the horrors of the Persian Gulf War (1990–91) unfold on her television in Switzerland, she began twisting the tissues she had used one after another to dry her tears until the tissue box was empty.¹ However, the Abrouc had already begun to take shape well before this moment.² Charfi recalled, “I found this character and then set it aside, knowing I’d come back to it when the moment was right.”³ The Gulf War did not invent the Abrouc so much as call it forth. “Crumpling, rolling, nervously twisting paper in front of the screen,” she has said, was “all I could, and all I allowed myself to do, during the Gulf War.”⁴ 

Charfi was in the process of preparing an application for the 15th International Biennial of Contemporary Textile in Lausanne when images of the Gulf War brought her a sudden clarity. Watching the Aberics multiply across her apartment floor, she understood: “This was it. I would take part in the Biennial and present these small figures.”⁵  The 1992 Lausanne Biennial became Charfi’s career breakthrough. There, she presented Golfe (Gulf, 1991; fig. 2), an installation consisting of a 4-by-3-meter Plexiglas bin filled with white marble powder, upon which she laid hundreds of small black Aberics crafted from stained-and-twisted silk paper. The Gulf War had, in just two years, claimed more than 3,000 Iraqi civilian lives and far more military personnel. Golfe emerged from a double urgency: to respond to the war and to reckon with the politics of visibility that determine what is seen and what is systematically withheld. Television, Charfi felt, was not showing the full weight of the dead. “What wasn’t visible on television, I could feel and see in my own hands.”⁶

In Golfe, that moment of realization is transposed into form. Charfi chose the color black for the Aberics because it rendered them anonymous, as these were, she said, “charred figures, after all.”⁷ The length and width of the Plexiglas bin mirror the standard aspect ratio of televisions of the time, while the white marble powder, chosen for its luminosity and texture, evokes both television-screen grain and the pale desert terrain of southern Iraq, where ground operations were concentrated. One could argue that seen from above, Golfe resembles a frozen broadcast of an explosion’s aftermath. Only upon closer inspection do the individual Aberics emerge, scattered across the white expanse (fig. 3). Golfe operates as a still image in deliberate tension with the moving ones that circulated during the war, reading as a call to pause, to mourn, to resist the constant flow of the news cycle. Yet in rendering the figures anonymous and the scene faintly surreal, the work also unsettles that very impulse toward empathy. The sorrow it provokes is real, but it attaches to no one in particular, dissolving into the same endless, faceless current of alarming news that the installation sets out to call out.

The anecdote regarding the creation of Golfe offers a glimpse into the artist’s temperament, which is inseparable from the work itself. Charfi was acutely sensitive to the violence that humans inflict upon one another. Those who knew her recall an intense, at times fiery presence, whose response to the world translated into an almost obsessive engagement with her practice, particularly in her treatment of the Aberics.⁸ This same passion propelled a sustained pursuit of formal, technical, and conceptual freedom. As she put it, “The character adapts to all situations, all techniques; it allows me to pursue very different projects. The structure of the Aberics gives me freedom.”⁹

A year after presenting Golfe in Lausanne, Charfi held her first survey exhibition in Tunisia, her country of birth, at the state-run Galerie Yahia in Tunis. Bringing together nine works, the show announced both the persistence of her engagement with the Abrouc and her extraordinary fluency across techniques. Alongside Golfe (1991), she presented an entirely new body of work, including four spatial installations (figs. 5–8)—Installation horizontale no. 1 (1993), Installation verticale no. 4 (1993), Installation pyramidale (1993), and Installation horizontale no. 2 (1993)—in which the Aberics, each molded in a different position, are encased in individual transparent plastic boxes arranged in varying configurations.¹⁰ Whereas the Aberics in Golfe are exposed and untethered, those in the later installations are trapped, held in place by the structure that also displays them. Their serial arrangement carries multiple echoes: the tower blocks of a modern city, the compartmentalized logic of the factory floor, the clinical order of a laboratory, the rows of shelving in a supermarket, and all the ways contemporary life organizes and contains. The exhibition was rounded out by the sculpture Espace. Vie (1993; fig. 4) and three colored relief collages (figs. 9–11): Mutation I (1992), Mutation II (1992), and 2030 (1992). 

Taken together, the works shown at Galerie Yahia sketched the coordinates of Charfi’s broader research in the years to come: an inquiry into the regimes of representation and the dispositifs of control through which life is ordered and constrained.¹¹ The Aberics thus foreground her interest in the lived, embodied experience of violence produced by these structures, allowing her to “reveal reality in its different aspects.”¹² Running alongside this critical outlook is also something more intimate. The 1993 survey exhibition drew attention to the centrality of gesture in Charfi’s practice and that of her hand at work: twisting, twirling, folding, rolling. Charfi did not position herself as an explicitly feminist artist, nor did she make work addressing gender-based violence or patriarchy in direct terms. But she saw in her very act of making by hand a feminine lineage, and in that sense, considered her practice to be inherently feminine—a conviction she expressed with characteristic directness: “I love to touch, to handle materials, probably because women have done so for centuries; and I see no contradiction between this and the most advanced technologies. After all, one rolls dough the way one rolls plastic: The gesture is the same. I assert my womanhood through my art.”¹³

Showing this body of work in Tunisia in 1993 was, in retrospect, a revolution, though one that went unrecognized at the time. The press greeted the exhibition warmly, yet largely without acknowledging what was genuinely unprecedented about it: This was arguably the first exhibition in Tunisia to present installations as its primary form, and among the rare occasions in which installation art had been shown in the country at all.¹⁴ One reviewer, writing for Al Shorouk, notes the work’s novelty, attributing it to Charfi’s formation abroad: “Coming from a different cultural ground, the artist brings to it an experience shaped elsewhere, one that has endowed her with a distinct formation and a different artistic horizon.”¹⁵ 

This framing, however, tells only part of the story. Although Charfi had left Tunisia in 1980 to pursue a PhD at the Université Paris 1 Sorbonne before eventually settling in Switzerland, her artistic formation had begun at home, in a decade of considerable renewal in the local art scene.¹⁶ She enrolled at the École des beaux-arts de Tunis in 1975, just a year after a sweeping overhaul of its pedagogical model under its director Safia Farhat (1924–2004). Renamed the Institut supérieur des arts, d’architecture et d’urbanisme de Tunis (ITAAUT), the school had replaced its colonial-era syllabus with a curriculum that brought theory and practice into closer dialogue and paved the way for more conceptual approaches to art-making.¹⁷ Farhat was herself a practicing artist who had turned to craft-based mediums in her own material explorations, and she had produced numerous monumental commissions for public buildings and spaces.¹⁸ Under Farhat’s leadership, the school became closely integrated with initiatives that linked students to artisanal production and textile industries.¹⁹ Even though Farhat’s art and reforms had little to do with installation art, the imprint of her directorship was nonetheless legible in the work of students like Charfi, who went on to build a practice founded on making by hand, material research, and experimentation with scale. 

Throughout her years abroad, Charfi kept Tunisia close. She visited regularly and exhibited there at multiple points in her career, thereby remaining enmeshed in its artistic networks. But unlike Farhat and fellow graduates of the ITAAUT, Charfi was not engaged in a project of asserting a distinctly Tunisian identity through art. That her work found institutional support in the cultural landscape of President Ben Ali’s authoritarian regime is itself noteworthy: Unsparing in its engagement with violence, control, and the darker currents of contemporary life, it might easily have not.²⁰ And yet it did. Following the 1993 Galerie Yahia exhibition, Charfi returned to Tunisia in 1999 for a subsequent survey at the state-run Maison des arts du Belvédère, and she continued to participate in group exhibitions throughout the 2000s and 2010s. 

In her notes, she describes her relationship to the country with a wry brevity: “I went away from Tunisia (without leaving it).”²¹ Charfi’s story is not one of diaspora defined by alienation and longing, but rather one of an artist who moved fluidly between Tunisia and Switzerland, shaped by both and reducible to neither. While some of her works do address the experience of immigration, this is but a single thread within a practice far broader in its concerns. Rather than grounding her work in the specificities of a single cultural context, Charfi conceived it as operating on a universal register, leaving space for many forms of identification and interpretation. As she put it: “My work is open to multiple interpretations. It is not necessary to provide explanations.”²² 

The 1990s and early 2000s were an extraordinarily prolific period for Charfi. Between 1993 and 2000, she had six solo exhibitions and took part in numerous group presentations internationally. This rhythm gave her both the impetus and the resources to expand her practice into new territories: textile, print, photography, video, site-specific and interactive installations, and performance. This expansion is perhaps best illustrated by her consecutive participation in the Dak’Art: African Contemporary Art Biennale between 1998 and 2004. From its inception in 1992, the Biennale had positioned itself as a platform for some of the most avant-garde artists emerging from the continent, with the Grand Prix Léopold Sédar Senghor signaling its evolving criteria—from the material and sculptural practices of artists such as Moustapha Dimé (1952–1998) to the large-scale textile installations Hommage aux chasseurs du Mandé (1994–96) of Abdoulaye Konaté (born 1953). For historians, though, it was not until 1998 that Dak’Art shifted from the modernist paradigms that had shaped much of post-independence African art toward a more conceptually driven and politically engaged contemporary practice.²³ Charfi’s participation must be understood within this broader reorientation: She was among a generation of artists in Africa who, earlier on, had enacted this shift. Her participation in Dak’Art 1998 and recognition with the Grand Prix in Dak’Art 2000 for Installation verticale (1999; fig. 12)and Numismatique (1999; fig. 13) consolidate this position.²⁴

At the 1998 edition, Charfi took part with Sous-vêtements (Underwear) (1996–97; fig. 14), a textile wall installation composed of a white tank top paired with a black one cut from mosquito netting.²⁵ The artist affixed 17 rectangular pockets to the latter with white thread stitched in horizontal rows from which she suspended eight seemingly floating Aberics. The work reiterates her interest in forms and materials that evoke control (the grid and the netting), anonymity (the mass-produced white tank top), movement versus constraint (the Aberics that are held in place yet appear to be in motion), and a tension between visibility and concealment (the juxtaposition of opaque and transparent fabrics). Furthermore, in taking the form of garments, Sous-vêtements anticipated a new direction in the artist’s practice: performance, in which her works are activated by her own body and those of her audiences.

In fact, at the 2002 Dak’Art Biennale, Charfi presented Cry of a Child (2002), a multimedia installation accompanied by what would be her first performance. This work was made in the shadow of the looming Iraq War (2003–11). Charfi, who had watched the first Gulf War unfold on television as she anxiously rolled Aberics between her fingers, now placed a screen featuring a similar scene, this time as a deliberate mise-en-abyme, in the gallery. In this video, an unidentifiable figure surrounded by dozens of small red paper pellets faces the viewer (fig. 15). The pellets, which Charfi dubbed “red seeds,” marked a new development in her visual vocabulary.²⁶ Where the Aberics, in their twisted configurations, register and hold the weight of grief and suffering, the red seeds propose a counter-gesture: They are designed to be unfolded, handled, and cared for, inviting, however symbolically, a release from that pain. As a pair of hands slowly unfolds the paper pellets one by one, their heart shapes are revealed before they are let go to drift freely across the frame. The same forms reappear in the installation space, where they are scattered atop laminated photographic bands of Aberics that descend from the ceiling to the floor.

Emerging, in her words, from a “desire to call for peace,” these seeds were also an invitation to act.²⁷ They became central to the performative format Charfi termed L’Offrande (The Offering), which she first presented at the 2002 edition of the Biennale (fig. 16). During the performance, the artist distributed medals, each containing a red seed that when unfolded, revealed a delicate paper heart. Charfi invited people to gently open the heart and place it back inside the medal around their neck, implicating them in what she understood as a shared act of care (fig. 17). A decade after the first Gulf War, she no longer attempted to bear witness to the dead. Instead, she turned toward the living, asking what role each viewer may have played in allowing such violence to unfold.

By Dak’Art 2004, Charfi had developed L’Offrande into a multicomponent project titled Laboratoire de paix (Laboratory of Peace).²⁸ Laboratoire de paix was not a fixed artwork with a stable form; indeed, Charfi conceived of it as an open project whose components and presentation would evolve with each showing. While the full documentation needed to trace its many iterations is still being recovered, existing video recordings, notes from the artist, and the photographic series L’Offrande (2003; figs. 18–22) provide a clear sense of its props, staging, and choreography. During the performance, Charfi enacted the symbolic opening of her womb, simulated on her body through a transparent hemisphere and an inflated plastic bag, by incising it with a pair of scissors and releasing its contents: red seeds, which fell and dispersed across laminated photographic strips on the floor. The gesture unfolded slowly and deliberately, transforming an act of incision into one of revelation and offering. As she described it: “Once the womb is revealed to the audience, it becomes a flower; it begins to disclose its secrets, offers seeds to be opened, and invites a moment of unity through simple gestures and a shared act of hope.”²⁹ To extend this invitation, she read aloud her poem “Metamorphosis of a Seed” (2002) and distributed medals to the audience, echoing a gesture first introduced in L’Offrande (2002). Charfi conceived Laboratoire de paix as a kind of experimental protocol through which a new world might emerge—a utopian vision emanating from her creative womb. 

First conceived for the 2003 Festival Rencontres d’art de la Médina in Tunis, the project was shaped by a visit Charfi made to the Sufi shrine of Sidi Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani (1077/78–1166) while scouting venues for the festival.³⁰ It was there, she recounts, that the idea of the laboratory came to her. In her notes, she describes the project as one that “while touching on the political, is characterized by its transcendental dimension, which suits the nature of this place entirely. A place where one prays for the best wishes, where one prays for the dead, and celebrates this through offerings.”³¹ That she designed the project to premiere in a shrine rather than in an exhibition space is essential to understanding how it fits within the broader context of her body of work. 

At first glance, Laboratoire de paix risks appearing as the naïvest corner of Charfi’s practice, as too simplistic to sit comfortably alongside her more politically incisive work. Yet, what reads as naïveté carries within it a kind of spiritual clarity, one closer in spirit to the Islamic concept of niyyah, or the sincere, inner intention of the heart to act solely for what is right. It is as though Charfi left the shrine with the conviction that dedicating a chapter of her life’s work to fostering empathy was not a detour but a necessity. Laboratoire de paix remains her only performative project, but it nonetheless has a central place within her constellation of works and persisted as a key preoccupation until her untimely death in 2018. The veil developed for Laboratoire de paix would prove foundational to a decisive conceptual consolidation in her practice for what she later named “Human-Lace.” In a text from 2007, she likens the veil to a “human lace,” describing it as “the hundreds of Aberics that my hands, my saliva, and my perspiration have helped to weave.”³² More than a metaphor, this formulation framed her entire practice as a cumulative, embodied process of making. In a document outlining her final wishes, she made this explicit, writing: “Human-Lace is my overall project.”³³

Understanding Charfi’s body of work as an intricate system of lace held together by threads that cross and knot into distinct but connected clusters is essential. Throughout her life, she produced abundant and diverse artworks across mediums and themes, but her practice consistently retained the same core: the Abrouc, the direct involvement of the artist’s body, and an observation of the world that impelled each work. Underlying these elements was a belief in a larger purpose, with art serving as its medium. As she herself clearly stated, “I love humanity, I am concerned with the human being; what is reflected in my work is not a message, but a social preoccupation.”³⁴ In this sense, her work sought to bind, to gather, and to produce moments of shared attention, extending the logic of the “Human-Lace” beyond the work itself to encompass those who encounter it.

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The following interview, entitled “MoMA and the World: The International Program,” conducted in 2010 by Amy Horschak, former Assistant Director, Academic Programs, was originally published on MoMA’s Inside/Out blog. In this wide-ranging conversation, Levenson reflects on the International Program and his vision for its evolving mission. As part of spearheading a new direction for the International Program, he paved the way for post: notes on art in a global context, the online platform for publishing on the Museum’s global research program that he initiated in 2013.

We are republishing this interview, with necessary updates, in Levenson’s memory and in recognition of his long-standing contributions to the work of MoMA’s International Program and to the broader field of museum practice.

In 1952, The Museum of Modern Art established the International Program of Circulating Exhibitions, which was supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, with the aim of sending exhibitions to museums around the world. The following year, the International Council was organized to provide long-term financial support to the program.

Amy Horschak: In light of MoMA’s installation Abstract Expressionist New York [2010–11] and the exhibition of many of the “AbEx” artists abroad by the International Program (IP) in the 1950s, can you comment on the often-made claims that the IP was, at that time, part of a CIA project? As Eva Cockcroft commented in her 1974 essay “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War,” “The political relationship between Abstract Expressionism and the Cold War can be clearly perceived through the international programs of MoMA.”

Jay Levenson: That’s a quotation that in some ways is probably close to the truth and in others is extremely misleading. One of the program’s major goals in those days was to help American artists become better known internationally. The United States has never had a ministry of culture, and in the early years of the program the Federal government was hamstrung by McCarthyism. The Museum felt it would be disastrous for the government to become involved with the visual arts, so it made perfect sense for MoMA to take the lead in circulating shows of contemporary American artists. And of course the Museum had to be aware of the importance of promoting American culture internationally in the context of the Cold War. Whether that political dimension led the Museum to favor AbEx artists, as some commentators have claimed, is another question altogether. It’s actually been argued that the CIA was itself behind the exhibition program, but the agency’s influence is hardly needed to explain the initiative. Moreover, I find it extremely difficult to believe that the Abstract Expressionists were selected by MoMA for inclusion as an intentional stylistic contrast with the Socialist Realist works that the Soviet Union was exhibiting by its artists, as a way of demonstrating that American culture allowed creative freedom while this USSR did not. I’m certain that the Museum’s curators chose to exhibit AbEx artists internationally for the same reason they showed them in New York: because they believed in their importance as artists. Of course, there is no documentation one way or the other, and the debate is likely to continue forever.

The International Program, in its early years, was able to circulate an extraordinary number of shows and to send them all over the world. This was possible because of the relatively low costs of shipping and installation, the sky-high dollar of the period, and insurance values for modern and contemporary art that were nothing like today’s. Conservation was not thought to be an issue for such recently created works, and climate control and security of facilities were not the same issues that they are now, so exhibitions were sent to relatively modest venues that could never be considered today for shows of this type.

AH: Why and when did [the] IP stop circulating exhibitions?

JL: While the traveling exhibition program was a remarkable success, over time it began to seem like a less effective way of reaching the parts of the world that had been the special interest of the IP—the countries outside of North America and Western Europe that were not as well connected to the international museum scene. The shows were by then organized by the curatorial departments rather than by the Program, and were often more aimed at a New York audience than an international public, and costs had risen dramatically. For those reasons, when I joined the department, I began looking for other ways to help connect MoMA to the broader world. The first new initiative was the suggestion of Patterson Sims, then head of [MoMA’s Department of] Education. He proposed that we start a series of workshops at MoMA, drawing on museum professionals from different parts of the world, and we began with a group of Latin American colleagues. The first workshop, which focused on the departments of the Museum that were involved with organizing exhibitions, was so successful that our program turned into a yearly event, with participants in turn from Central and Eastern Europe, eastern Asia, and Africa. We even sent a group of MoMA staff to Hong Kong for a workshop there with Asian colleagues, and another, smaller, curatorial workshop took place in India. More recently we have concentrated on curatorial workshops, which connect our own curators with colleagues from parts of the world with which they may not be familiar, and on working with research groups from our curatorial departments to expand the Museum’s knowledge of artistic centers outside North America and Western Europe.

AH: How did [the] IP develop its Primary Documents publication series? 

JL: That was an idea that came from a proposal by Laura Hoptman, then a curator here in the Department of Painting and Sculpture. I was looking for a new program for Eastern Europe, and she suggested that we compile an anthology of historical documents on art from the region, translated into English. It was a very difficult first project because of the many different and complicated languages involved, but the result—a compendium of important writings by artists, critics, and historians from the 1950–2000 period—turned out to be so useful that it has served as the model for the entire series. It not only allows MoMA to focus its audience’s attention on areas of the world that for one reason or another do not fit into the exhibition program; it also helps to direct the Museum’s own attention to these regions. We have already published anthologies on Argentina [2004], Venezuela [2008], Sweden [2008], China 2010], Japan [2013], Brazil [2016], the Arab World [2018], and Central and Eastern Europe [2002 and 2018] and we have [three] titles in process on [the African continent, Korea, and South Asia]. I’m pleased with the reach of these new programs and believe that they help to connect the Museum with an ever-expanding world in ways that would no longer be possible through an exhibition program alone.

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From February 5 to 11, 2026, members of the C-MAP Africa group from The Museum of Modern Art traveled to Morocco on a research trip that included several cities: Marrakech, Casablanca, Rabat, Tangier, and Tétouan. Over the course of the visit, the group met with artists, curators, scholars, and cultural practitioners and toured studios, archives, museums, and independent initiatives. Upon their return, the travelers were invited to reflect on a single moment that shaped their experience and prompted them to reconsider their work at MoMA. Because these responses are intentionally brief, they do not fully capture the breadth of encounters that shaped the experience. 

The group extends its heartfelt thanks to Chahrazad Zahi, whose knowledge and good spirit were integral to the trip. The group also remains deeply grateful to the many artists, scholars, collectors, and cultural workers across Morocco who so generously shared their time, knowledge, and spaces with us, and whose hospitality and openness made the journey possible including but not limited to the following: Oumayma Abouzid, Amina Agueznay, Mustapha Akrim, Yto Barrada, Elisabeth Bauchet-Bouhlal, Amina Belghiti, Amina Benbouchta, Hicham Benohoud, Meriem Berrada, Khalil Binebine, Mahi Binebine, M’barek Bouhchichi, Hicham Bouzid, Nadia Chabâa, Larbi Cherkaoui, Kamal Daghmoumi, Florence Renault Darsi, Hassan Darsi, Touria El Glaoui, Safaa Erruas, Oumaima Haitof, Hassan Hajjaj, Laila Hida, Amine Houari, Abdellah Karroum, Imane Lahrich, Othman Lazraq, Mohamed Mourabiti, Amina Mourid, Mounia Yasmine O’Neal and the team at The Mothership Tangier: Khawla, Chef Mohamed, BaMjido, Othmane, Saïd, and Si Mohammed; Juan Asis Palao Gómez, Mehdi Qotbi, Karim Rafi, Younes Rahmoun, Sara Rerhrhaye, Nadia Sabri, Abderrahim Yamou, and Fatiha Zemmouri.

The 2026 C-MAP Africa trip was organized and researched by Beya Othmani, the C-MAP Africa fellow (2024–26).

Smooth Nzewi, The Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, C-MAP Africa Group Leader

On Mohamed Chabâa 

The stewardship of an artist’s legacy is something I find deeply compelling, especially when it is taken on by family members. Nadia Chabâa, an art historian who has dedicated herself to her father’s legacy, stands out as a particularly inspiring example. Before our visit to her home, my knowledge of Mohamed Chabâa (1935–2013) was spotty and largely limited to his role in the triumvirate that founded the Casablanca Art School. But his contributions ran much deeper. He combined artistic practice, theory, and pedagogy, and architecture was at the heart of it all.

In 1966, Chabâa joined the Casablanca Art School as a teacher, leading workshops in decoration and graphic arts and establishing an Arabic calligraphy workshop as a core part of the curriculum. Alongside Mohamed Melehi (1936–2020) and Farid Belkahia (1934–2014), he co-organized Présence Plastique, a manifesto-exhibition held in Jemaa el-Fna Square in Marrakech in 1969, deliberately bringing art into public space.

In 1982, he joined the faculty of the National School of Architecture in Rabat, Morocco’s first architecture school, and in 1994, he returned to his alma mater, the National Institute of Fine Arts in Tétouan, as its director, overhauling both its Italian classical curriculum, which had been place since Chabâa was a student there in the 1950s, and its pedagogy. There, he shaped a generation of Moroccan artists now active on the international scene, including Younes Rahmoun and Safaa Erruas, both of whom we visited during our trip.

I was also quite impressed with how Chabâa’s own artistic practice evolved over the years, from hard-edge abstraction of the 1960s and 1970s to looser abstraction in the 1980s to more gestural lines from the late 1990s onward.

Ksenia Nouril, Assistant Director, International Program

C-MAP research trips typically culminate over a year’s worth of distance learning. They are an on-the-ground continuation of the dialogic, group-based learning practiced by C-MAP members at MoMA in their monthly meetings with artists, curators, and scholars, which are organized by the C-MAP fellow and the C-MAP group leader. Thus, our short but precious visit to Morocco was but one piece of a larger and longer-term project with deep roots in our institution’s mission to connect people to and through art.

This metaphor of piecing or putting together lends itself to the many ways of making we experienced in our multicity venture via plane, train, and automobile. I was particularly struck by the power of pattern, which emerged as a salient trope for artists with whom we met or whose works we saw on view at various venues. Whether it is the repetition of an iconic image in the works of Safaa Erruas or Hassan Hajjaj or the repetition of a shape or color in urban and religious architecture alike, such as at the Madrasa Ben Youssef, pattern permeated our visual field. Meeting with Amina Agueznay brought pattern into the conversation a different way, specifically through the traditional weaving patterns incorporated in her work Curriculum Vitae from 2020–21, which comprises dozens of blocks made by weavers from different communities across Morocco. Each block represents that weaver’s “language,” which is passed down from generation to generation and is either well known or endangered. Agueznay also showed us Burials, a work from 2024 that also meditates on waving as a language, creating parallels between words and stitches. 

Leonardo Bravo, Director of Public Engagement, Department of Learning and Engagement

The opportunity to travel to Morocco with the C-MAP Africa group felt like stepping into a long-held dream. Since my youth, Morocco has occupied a vivid place in my imagination—shaped by the mystique of North Africa, the wandering spirit of the Beats, and the hypnotic sounds of the master musicians of Jajouka.

To finally move through the country itself—along the vibrant streets of Marrakech, amid the coastal rhythms of Casablanca and the layered histories of Tétouan and Rabat, and across the luminous threshold of Tangier—was to encounter a reality even more compelling than the one I had imagined.

Across these cities, Morocco revealed itself as a landscape shaped over millennia, where culture and history unfold in layered and interconnected ways. It is a place continually formed and re-formed through the shifting currents of empire, colonization, and self-determination.

Particularly moving was the exhibition on Berber and Amazigh culture across the Maghreb at the Pierre Bergé Museum of Berber Arts, which offered a powerful testament to the grace, dignity, and resilience of these communities. The presentation underscored how Amazigh cultural traditions continue to resonate across generations and geographies.

Among the many memorable encounters during the trip, our visit to Think Tanger stood out. The work of Hicham Bouzid, Amina Mourid, and their collective—creating a platform for collaborative learning, research, and public inquiry—deeply resonated with my own interests. Their experimental, research-driven approach to collective knowledge-making at the intersection of arts, culture, and civic life closely aligns with my institutional work.

I left the visit inspired and hopeful about developing stronger connections that might lead to future collaboration with MoMA.

Oluremi C. Onabanjo, The Peter Schub Curator, The Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography

Our time in Morocco was sprawling in its scope, intensive in its sensibility. From Marrakech to Casablanca, then Rabat to Tétouan, our final day in Tangier remains crisp in my mind’s eye.

The night prior, we had visited Yto Barrada’s inimitable Cinémathèque Tangier—followed by a convivial dinner over which we discussed Morocco’s expanded presence at the forthcoming Venice Biennale (Barrada representing France; Amina Agueznay representing Morocco).

On a dewy, fragile morning, the group arrived at The Mothership, where we encountered the expanded fields of Barrada’s artistic and social practice. In ethos, The Mothership is a site for artistic retreat, experimental research, and interdisciplinary exploration inspired by natural dyes and Indigenous traditions. Physically, it consists of a series of studios and dwelling spaces occupied by visiting residents, collaborators, and Barrada’s family. These are threaded together and surrounded by a variety of flowering and subsistence gardens.

Situated on a dramatic set of cliffs that overlook the Strait of Gibraltar and face Spain, the view from the rear balcony of The Mothership is anchored by a massive tree. Here, Barrada has constructed a sturdy platform that one can access through netted passageways entangled among branches. She calls this her raft.

In considering this view, I was catapulted back to the first time I leafed through her photobook A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project (2005)—a project that shaped my understanding of the stakes of contemporary photography in Morocco and which anchors MoMA’s photographic holdings of Barrada’s work.

Looking skyward at her raft, I was plunged back into the world of French social work pioneer and writer Fernand Deligny that Barrada had shaped at MoMA through Artist’s Choice: Yto Barrada—A Raft (2021–22), which was organized thoughtfully in collaboration with my colleague Lucy Gallun.

Still reeling from the loss of Jay Levenson—who has made, and continues to make, so much possible within and beyond MoMA—I was reminded of what it means to sustain an insistent generosity of spirit and a rigorous fidelity to life in all of its forms.

Thomas (T.) Jean Lax, Curator, Department of Media and Performance

Mother, Ship

Yto Barrada has been building rafts with others for over twenty years. Consider the tree house she made in 2005 in the garden of her Tangier home, which later that year she photographed and called Raft in Strangler Figtree. Or her 2021 tabletop sculpture—Tamo’s Raft (Le radeau de Tamo)—included in her Artist’s Choice exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art.

Yto’s rafts are rarely flat, much like the buoyant structures made of fastened materials used by migrants as makeshift boats. You don’t need me to recall images of Mediterranean migrants here for you to call to mind the morphological echoes between Yto’s assemblages and the vessels captured in photographs endlessly circulated via news and social media.

Those shapes are echoed in the meandering wires that wind atop Tamo’s ship and hover in the diagonal lines of ladders extending below the tree house and web of branches linking the two-hundred-year-old strangler fig tree to her house.

In this trail of associations, ghosted but not forgotten, a network of rafts seems to breed more floating platforms. There is a technical word for this type of vehicle: a mothership, designed to carry, lead, or serve other vehicles as they travel through water, air, and space.

Yto’s rafts tend to float in groups. To call them “Yto’s” rafts is itself a usable fiction. They are perhaps better described as our rafts; Yto keeps them company.

Michelle Elligott, Chief of Archives, Library, and Research Collections

Specificity, universality, transmission of ideas, connection, circulation, and yes, beauty.

Younes Rahmoun’s presentation at the Tétouan School of Fine Arts helped me reflect on the experiences, new ideas, and hope that were centered during this most enlightening trip to several cities in Morocco.

Formed and informed by his family tradition, and deeply rooted to his locality, Younes discussed his background and practice. I enjoyed learning about his Ghorfa (room) series in particular. With his mother’s support, he inhabited a small space under the stairs in the family home, which became his studio—a space for work and meditation. He translated that architectural space into a series of drawings, objects, and installations in various media.

Some installations appeared in gallery contexts, while others were situated in the landscape—but always with the artist’s intended desire for the viewers to concentrate on their “here and now.” His presentation also spurred me to contemplate the path to my current role, from my first art history courses at Smith College, where Younes had a residency and solo exhibition in 2024 that included his most recent Ghorfa, which he installed in the woods a few miles outside of campus.

The show was curated by Emma Chubb, who joined our meeting in Tétouan, and together we all toured the School of Fine Arts library and discussed the critical importance of collecting, preserving, and making accessible research materials, particularly of artists, populations, and regions that may be underrepresented in research institutions.

I am grateful to all the inspiring people we met throughout the trip, and I felt honored to think together with such wonderful MoMA colleagues, including our dear Jay Levenson, who helped open horizons for so many with his humor and humility.

Kate Lewis, The Agnes Gund Chief Conservator

I am very grateful to all the collectors, collectives, curators, publishers, researchers, and, of course, artists (including their families and colleagues) across Morocco who so generously welcomed us into their homes, studios, spaces, museums, galleries, and cinemas over the course of the 2026 C-MAP Africa research trip.

At MoMA, artists and makers are integral to the stewardship of the collections. A clear thread that emerged during this journey was how the process of making—of choosing materials and techniques, of collaborating with others—is deeply influenced by histories, religion, language, politics, and communities.

In the beautiful city of Tétouan, we were fortunate to visit Safaa Erruas in her downtown apartment studio. She shared with us her “ideas and materials from my internal kitchen” and talked about an artwork Les Drapeaux (2011–12).

This piece consists of the flags of the 22 Arab League member states reimagined as white pearls embroidered on sheets of 600 gsm cotton paper, reflecting on the Arab Spring.

Embroidery is a local tradition, passed down from mother to daughter, and the Tétouan practice is known for its stylized flowers and geometric shapes on unbleached canvas. It was interesting to hear how she worked with local embroiderers to create this painstaking work.

The multilayered significance of this approach and method reminded me that beyond materials and process, people are at the center of art and also, by extension, museum collections.

Jay Levenson embodied this ethos: Meet artists in their communities, where they are.

In memory of Jay Levenson (1948–2026), Director of MoMA’s International Program

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Among the topics that were discussed were assemblies of the human and other-than-human as collectives, assemblies of materials into collections, and assemblies of spaces and places into shared worlds. The speakers drew from their engagement with exhibitions, films, public programs, and cultural institutions to map how these forms of assemblies realized the poetic potential of coming together through difference. Assemblies in Uncertain Times offered an opportunity to imagine other futures together, complicating established linearities and teleologies.

The 2025 C-MAP Seminar took place on June 11–12, 2025 and was conceived by Diana Iturralde, Cisneros Institute Research Fellow; Beya Othmani, C-MAP Africa Fellow; Carlos Quijon Jr., C-MAP Southeast & East Asia Fellow; and Ananya Sikand, C-MAP Bombay/Mumbai Fellow with support from the International Program: Marta Dansie, Department Coordinator; Jay Levenson, Director; Ksenia Nouril, Assistant Director; and Elena Pérez-Ardá López, C-MAP Program Coordinator. The C-MAP Seminar is organized in collaboration with the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America at MoMA.

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